For Hemisphere Media Group, Canal Uno in Colombia is the priority this year.
“We are focused on our new business in Colombia: Canal Uno. There is a lot of work to do from now until mid year to be able to relaunch the channel in Colombia. We are working very hard to prepare all aspects of the business: Programming, original productions, marketing, branding, news, and the programming grid. It is as if we were launching a new station,” said Alan Sokol, CEO and president of Hemisphere Media Group.
He expressed that they will use Hemisphere executives in some aspects of the station, “but we are going to have a very strong team located in Colombia. We continue searching for a general manager and a CFO to handle the day to day of the business and ensure its success.”
He announced that Cinelatino was launched on UNE of Millicom’s DTH platform in Colombia. “The launching complements our distribution under UNE”.
Other novelties were the renovation of Televisión Dominicana’s branding, the look and feel of Centroamérica TV and Cinelatino.
For Pasiones, they are investing in new types of novelas. “Since last year, we are programming Turkish novelas with which we have done very well,” he said.
“We just launched our fourth Turkish novela. We have discovered that these novelas do excellently. TV viewers want contents from different parts of the world, not the same thing they have seen for years. For example, novelas from Turkey, Korea and Brazil, show different aspects of the world through the characters, the settings and the costumes, and they work very well for us,” he added.
He commented that for WAPA América they are working on two new original programming concepts that will be launched soon. “They are comedies with well known casts, that will appeal not only to Puerto Ricans in the US, but to other groups as well,” he highlighted.